The clean-up of Chinese manufacturing: Examining the role played by changing techniques of production

Matthew Cole and Liyun Zhang

Economics Letters, 2019, vol. 180, issue C, 11-14

Abstract: We document the recent reductions in the pollution intensity of Chinese manufacturing and utilise the methods developed and applied by Levinson (2009, 2015) and Brunel (2017) to explain the underlying causes of this pollution clean-up. We find that, unlike in the US, compositional changes to the Chinese manufacturing sector have actually increased pollution emissions. This implies that the observed reductions in pollution intensities have been caused by large improvements in techniques of production driven by technology and/or regulations. The dominance of the technique effect in driving down pollution intensities is found whether we measure an ‘indirect’ technique effect or a direct effect using Laspeyres and Paasche indices.

Keywords: Pollution intensity; Composition effect; Technique effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O44 Q53 Q55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176519301090
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:180:y:2019:i:c:p:11-14

DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2019.03.030

Access Statistics for this article

Economics Letters is currently edited by Economics Letters Editorial Office

More articles in Economics Letters from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().